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Leaf Group Debuts Hunker Site, 'HuffPo' Introduces Strategy Blog

Leaf Group launched the last of a series of
new verticals today: the home design-focused Hunker. The site features home tours, product recommendations, personal essays and design tips for homeowners and apartment-dwellers.

A company
rep says it in talks with multiple advertisers interested in Hunker.

Sean Moriarty, CEO of Leaf Group, stated Hunker celebrates “individuality and self-expression
in design, providing our audience with the information and inspiration to create their ideal living spaces.”

In November, Demand Media rebranded
to Leaf Group and announced it would take down duplicated articles from its sites and decrease its reliance on SEO and Google.

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The company decided to create new brands, based on specific
categories that did well on its Livestrong and eHow sites. Leaf Group launched three new sites: pet-focused Cuteness, family tech site Techwalla and millennial-focused
personal finance site Sapling. Hunker is the fourth to debut.

Existing content from overlapping eHow categories was moved to these new sites.

“By
building brands within categories where we have years of expertise, and focusing on great content that helps people, we’ve been able to grow audiences quickly,” stated Mitchell Pavao, SVP
of media for Leaf Group. “This has also allowed eHow to focus its attention on the premium DIY space, with a renewed emphasis on sharable, inspirational content.”

The new brands are generating approximately 22 million visits per month and attracting more than 1 million combined followers on Facebook.

Separately, The Huffington
Post launched a new strategy blog called Keeping It 100. The site will publish monthly blog posts “giving an inside look at the hits and misses of HuffPost’s biggest
bets.”

The posts will focus on case studies from HuffPost’s audience development team and showcase what has worked and what hasn’t, such as determining how
to reach Gen Z and cultivating niche distributed communities.

Posts range from “Real Talk: The Do’s and Dont’s of Building a Chatbot” to “When Being
Truly Audience-First Means Giving Content a Back Seat.”